The Great Bands of Fiction

The post that was on the schedule for today is not happening right now. In order for me to write that post, two things have to happen. The first of those is that I have to do some research, which I have not yet done. The second thing is that my brain has to return to its usual level of semi-competence. My CFS has been more problematic than usual for the past week and a half or so, and a large part of that involves sporadic stretches of brain fog.

So, I’ve pushed today’s original blog topic to somewhere after the new year. Not exactly sure when. But that left me looking at a hole in the schedule for today.

There wasn’t anything on the schedule that I felt I could move up into today’s slot. And nothing I saw in my list of unscheduled topics really appealed to me.

However, there was an idea that had been floating around in my brain for a week or so. It was floating in an area of my brain that I usually try very hard to ignore, but on this occasion it seemed like it might just have the exact idea I needed.

Blame Spotify and Instafest

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter lately, and about a week or so ago that site became inundated with ‘Instafest’ graphics from everybody’s Spotify playlists.

If you’re unfamiliar, the Instafest app takes your most played artists from Spotify for the past year and turns that list into an ad for a fictional music festival. (At least, that’s how it was explained to me.)

I don’t really use Spotify. (In the past year, I believe I have listened to a grand total of one song on the site/app/whatever.) I’m more of an MP3 playlist kind of guy.

At first all of the Instafest ‘ads’ were unusual. And then the sheer ubiquity of them became kind of annoying. But then… (yes, after they’d already passed through annoying), I thought to myself, “I’d kind of like to have one of those myself.”

But, as I said, I don’t use Spotify, so I didn’t have the history for the app to pull a list from. Then I started thinking, and I realized that if I was going to be creating a line-up for a fictional music festival, I should really only be using fictional bands. That makes sense, right?

The A.R.T.I.F.I.C.E. Music App

At first I was just going to use one of the standard three Instafest backgrounds, but I quickly discovered that my MS Paint skills were not up to keeping that type of background image intact when removing and replacing the text overlaying it.

So, I started from scratch. That way I could also opt to not use the words ‘instafest’ or ‘spotify’ on my little graphic. I decided to rebrand the app as MetaFest. But as a replacement for Spotify, I went ahead and created the A.R.T.I.F.I.C.E. Music App.

You might remember that acronym from the A.R.T.I.F.I.C.E. Gate used to travel between realities that I’ve mentioned before. For those unfamiliar, it stands for Alternate Reality Transit Inter-Face & Interdimensional Convergence Engine. Which I have now repurposed as a music app designed to pull in songs from all across the multiverse.

So, here’s the completed graphic for Fictionfest…

And keep in mind that this graphic was made late at night during my now typical sleep-deprived insomniac state. So if you happen to notice that not everything is perfectly centered, keep it to yourself. (Thank you.)

Notable By Their Absence

I want to quickly address a few of the bands that aren’t listed as part of Fictionfest.

I contemplated including the Monkees in the lineup, but opted against it because while the group did portray fictional characters in a sitcom for two seasons back in the 1960s, they’ve performed, released albums, and toured as the Monkees under their own names ever since. So I do not consider them to be fictional.

Also, you’d expect Spinal Tap to be on a list of fictional bands. The problem with that in this case is that I’ve never actually seen the “This Is Spinal Tap” mockumentary.

If I had known I was going to do this post far enough ahead of time, I might have watched several films that my good close personal friend the Internet informs me had fictional bands in them. Oh well. Maybe there will be an eventual follow up post.

My Favorite Fictional Bands

These are listed in no particular order. On day one of the festival, the headliners are the Blues Brothers Band. The Blues Brothers is probably one of my five favorite movies of all time. And I’ll periodically have my Blues Brothers playlist running on repeat (containing both the original soundtrack and their Definitive Collection album). There’s an argument to be made that they aren’t really a fictional band because they’ve released a number of albums and have toured quite a bit. But while most of the band is playing semi-fictionalized versions of themselves, the (original) front men are Jake and Elwood Blues, not John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. The characters are indeed distinct from the actors/musicians.

My brother has been trying to get me to watch “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” for almost a year now. I finally did that just a couple of days ago, because I knew there were bands in it and I’d already decided to do this post. Scott Pilgrim is the base player for a garage band called Sex Bob-omb that gets involved in a battle of the bands. I’m only including Sex Bob-omb on this list because none of the bands that they encounter really did much for me.

DriveSHAFT was Charlie Pace’s band on “Lost”. A one-hit wonder known for their song ‘You All Everybody’.

Dethklock is, of course, not only the world’s most popular and successful death metal band, but also the seventh largest economy in the world. I would be completely ignorant of the band had my friend Dennis not introduced me to the show they exist in, the weirdly addicting animated black comedy Metalocalypse. (I was happy to learn that the series – cancelled in 2013 – will be getting a direct-to-video movie sometime soon.)

What list of fictional bands would be complete without some Muppets? Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem is the original and greatest of the various Muppet rock bands (nothing against Solid Foam or the unnamed band from “Muppets Tonight”). I’m just a little bit irked that there hasn’t been a real-world album from the band. Rowlf got his own CD release (“Ol Brown Ears is Back”), why not the Electric Mayhem?

The first of two bands on this list from the movie “High Fidelity”, they started out as Sonic Death Monkey, contemplated a change to Kathleen Turner Overdrive, but in the one song we’ve heard them perform, they were Barry Jive and the Uptown Five.

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer character Oz was in a band called Dingoes Ate My Baby. They frequently played Sunnydale’s nightclub The Bronze.

William S. Preston, Esquire and Ted “Theodore” Logan (better known as Bill & Ted) famously had a band called Wyld Stallynz, which also included two medieval princesses and Death himself on bass.

If you aren’t already familiar with Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers, I really have to question why you’re sitting there reading my blog when you should be doing everything in your power to watch the movie “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension”.

Originally, the heavy metal band formed by Bloom County’s Steve Dallas, Opus, Hodge Podge, and Bill the Cat was called Deathtongue. But after being brought before a congressional hearing on the effects of heavy metal music on youth, they ended up changing their name to Billy and the Boingers. Catchy, no?

Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes. I think that in recent years their actual name has become somewhat better known, but back in the late 70s/early 80s, they were pretty much universally known as “the weird alien band from the cantina in Star Wars”.

My Mom was a huge fan of the 1976 Kris Kristofferson / Barbra Steisand version of “A Star Is Born”, and the soundtrack to that film was one of the rare non-country and western records in the house. Two of Kristofferson’s contributions to that album were as the fictional rocker John Norman Howard and his band the Speedway. One of those songs, “Hellacious Acres” (about a theme park built by the devil where “admission is free, you pay to get out”) was one of my favorite songs when I was younger. Of course, that might be due to the chorus including the line, “Go to Hell!” I mean what child doesn’t like the occasional burst of profanity?

Headlining the festival’s second day is Hangman’s Joke, which was Eric Draven’s band in the movie “The Crow” (and its criminally underappreciated television adaptation “The Crow – Stairway To Heaven”.)

Mystik Spyral was the post-grunge band from the MTV animated series “Daria”. Which, I recently discovered, almost got its own spin-off series.

Cherry Bomb was the name of Beverly Switzler’s all-girl band in the movie “Howard the Duck”, a film which did horrible things to the minds of fans of the source material. My tendency is to watch it with my thumb on the fast forward button, slowing down only for the Cherry Bomb performances and one scene of Beverly crawling across her bed in bikini panties.

In the “Wayne’s World” movies, Wayne’s love interested Cassandra Wong is the lead singer of Crucial Taunt.

The on-stage abduction of Ellen Aim during an Ellen Aim and the Attackers concert is what sets events in motion in the movie “Streets of Fire.” (This is another movie about which I say: If you haven’t seen this yet, please do so at your earliest opportunity.)

Josie and the Pussycats barely made it onto this list, because out of the group’s many incarnations, I am only familiar with them from the first two seasons of “Riverdale”.

In “Blues Brothers 2000” (not as great as the original, but not as bad as most people seem to think) there is a climactic battle of the bands between the Blues Brothers Band and the Louisiana Gator Boys – a 22 member blues supergroup whose characters are played by music legends including B. B. King, Bo Diddley, Isaac Hayes, Dr. John, Lou Rawls, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Vaughn, among others.

The second band on the list from “High Fidelity”, the Kinky Wizards are a band composed of two shoplifting skate punks who plague the main character’s record store before he ultimately ends up producing their 3-song EP on his made-up-on-the-spot label Top Five Records.

School of Rock (from the movie of the same name) is a prep school music class turned into a rock band by guitarist Dewey Finn (played by Jack Black) who is impersonating a substitute teacher for a quick paycheck.

The first rock concert sponsored by WKRP in Cincinnati (from the show of the same name) was a British hoodlum rock group (“several cuts below punk”) called Scum of the Earth.

Exclusive to Jabba the Hutt’s palace on Tattooine, the Max Rebo Band entertained the crimelord with their music. Max Rebo himself – a blue, elephant-looking dude – was my Mom’s favorite character from “Return of the Jedi”.

And wrapping up day two of the festival, we have the Soggy Bottom Boys from “O Brother, Where Art Thou”. The Soggy Bottom Boys were three escaped convicts and a young black man who traded his soul to the devil for the ability to play guitar. Not exactly a band, they recorded the song “Man of Constant Sorrow” for ten dollars each, which – unbeknownst to them – became a major hit that simply can’t be kept in stock.

The Battle of the Bands

Going on a brief tangent now to talk about the concept of the Battle of the Bands.

I like the battle of the bands as a plot device. I like the idea of music groups facing off against one another. What I’d like to see is one where it’s an actual elimination tournament complete with tournament bracket. (I’ve got a weird affinity for tournament brackets.)

Some of the bands that I’ve listed above have been involved in a battles of the bands in their respective fictions. The Blues Brothers Band. Sex Bob-omb. Wyld Stallynz. The Louisiana Gator Boys. School of Rock. (I can’t remember if Mystik Spyral ever did one, but they seem like the type.) It’s apparently a popular trope.

So popular, in fact, that I’ve wanted to use it myself. I recently posted a piece called “Siren Song of the Stripper” in which I talked about my desire to produce a comic strip. I had a Battle of the Bands storyline that moved from LEGO-based webcomic idea to webcomic idea for a long time there.

The main cast of the strip (whichever strip it was at the time) would have to pick up instruments and enter a massive music tournament to achieve one of their objectives. As a result of which, I knew that I’d need to start creating more LEGO bands. Okay. Back to the festival breakdown…

My Personal Fictional Bands

For the third day of Fictionfest, all of the fictional bands on stage are bands of my own creation.

I had plans to write something (could have been a novel or a serial) entitled “Following Countless Spiders”. It takes place in the future and it’s established early on that one of the main characters is the son of someone with access to a government time machine. The main characters are all huge fans of an older (and now defunct) band called Countless Spiders. While watching a documentary about the early years of the band before they hit the bigtime, one of the main characters notices himself and his three friends in the crowd in some of the old early concert footage. So, they do the logical thing and steal the time machine, then go back to the band’s beginning and follow them on their first tour.

I had a storyline planned for “Ship & Crew 4 Hire” (discussed in my “Three Projects” post) where the Astrochelonian basically became the tour bus for the rock group Martha’s Bunker.

I’m still several posts away from adequately explaining who Shorp and Lep are, but there was a storyline I had for that pair of freelancers where they signed on as roadies for the band Tauge (pronounced like the Taj in Taj Mahal) on one of their big tours.

Later in that same timeline, the opening act for one of the dates on Tauge’s tour fails to show up, and Shorp and Lep convince the rest of the roadies to perform on stage as the named-on-the-spot band Roadie Trip.

There was a series of stories that I wanted to write about an all-girl rock group called Lesbian Lumberjack. I had stories to tell, and I had put a lot of development into the band. I knew all their names (lead singer Elena “Elle Elle” Grant, drummer Sophie Jurgen, guitarist Monique “Nique Von Shire” Devonshire, and keyboardist, bassist, and backup singer Trina “Backup” Singer). I knew the titles of most of the songs from their first three albums. I had even written the lyrics to one of their songs. (A parody of “Do, Re, Mi” that they only performed live.) I even knew all of the tattoos that Elle Elle had. But, as you’d expect from someone with this much writer’s block, no actual stories were produced. Sadly.

On one of Lesbian Lumberjack’s tours, their opening band was STD. Which people always assumed stood for sexually transmitted disease, but was actually short for self-titled debut.

Then come the groups for the previously indicated Battle of the Bands. I periodically post the phrase, “If I were starting a band today, it would be called ____________” on places like Twitter and Facebook. Three of those names were destined for the battle. Coffee Table Audiobook, Tarantula Downpour, and Popsicle Tontine.

I did have a couple of bands in the battle that were a little more than just a name. The first of these was Twelvis Presley, which was a band made up of a dozen Elvis impersonators.

The second of these bands I actually built a MOC for at the 2022 Bricks Cascade LEGO convention in Portland. $imeon $imoleons and the Zookeepers.

One of the LEGO collectable minifigure blind bag waves included a female zookeeper. When that happened, I was still ordering sixteen bags per wave from LEGO.com and trusting my luck. Well, five of those sixteen bags contained zookeepers. (Some luck.) After all the bags were opened I looked at the five zookeepers and said to myself, “That’s a band.”

Years later I got a four-pack of Batman minifigs, one of which was wearing a green tuxedo covered in dollar bills. I decided to swap out the cowl for the head of the gorilla costume guy, and suddenly I had the Zookeeper’s lead singer, $imeon $imoleons. Easy. They would probably gone up against the protagonists in the final round of the Battle of the Bands storyline.

The name of the final band of the final day of Fictionfest was arrived at when someone on Twitter asked the question, “What’s a good name for a band” and I, without thought or hesitation replied: Ku Ku La La Ha Ha Fafadingus the Third and the Bats Out of Hell, Michigan.

(Be warned: I have plans to talk about the name Ku Ku La La Ha Ha Fafadingus the Third in a post some day.)

And, Of Course, I Forgot One

It was only after I completed the ‘Fictionfest’ mockup image that I remembered about Acrylon. Acrylon was my first ever LEGO minifigure band concept.

It goes like this: The majority of LEGO elements are made of ABS plastic. ABS is short for acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. The band concept came to me as a result of trying to memorize what the ABS stood for.

So, I ended up with a band named Acrylon. Their first album was entitled Night Trial. And the band was composed of Jimmy Butadiene and the Styrene Brothers.

I had plans at the time to put together a couple of minifigures, build a stage, and display an Acrylon MOC at the 2014 Bricks Cascade (whose theme that year was the rock-n-roll inspired “Are You Ready To MOC?!”), but I was apparently distracted by a shiny object or something, and ended up building different MOCs instead.

Anyway, that was my post on fictional bands.